Tim Tebow | Daniel Paisner, The Ghost-Writer of Choice for Ray Lewis, Denzel Washington & Daymond John Shares How He Turns His Passion Into Profits + Tim Tebow Joins Clay Clark’s 2-Day Interactive Business Workshop (June 27-28)

Audio Transcription

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids, co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Time Show. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, I am fired up about today’s guest. He is a significantly above average ghostwriter. Mr. Daniel Paisner, how are you, sir? I’m good, Clay. I like that, significantly above average. I’m going to start using that. Well, you are one of the more humble people that I’ve ever cyberstalked, and so I would like to call you the greatest ghostwriter of all time, but I can’t do that, so I’m just going to say a significantly above average ghostwriter. I appreciate it. I think I’ll have a t-shirt made. I would like to ask you this because, obviously, if our listeners Google search your name, you’ve worked with Bob Hurley, Denzel Washington, Damon John, Ray Lewis, big names. Where did it all start? Where did you go to high school, and when did you first become interested in writing? Well, I grew up on Long Island, and I was kind of a journalism geek. I kind of came of age during the Watergate. I had posters of Woodward and Bernstein up on my wall when I was a kid. And I always thought I’d be a swashbuckling journalist, writing wrongs and setting America right. And I never quite thought that I’d be working in the trade in the way that I am now. I don’t think you could find a middle school kid or a high school kid anywhere in this country who’s dreaming of becoming a ghostwriter. It’s sort of a silent, hidden profession. And so I set out to become a journalist and I started doing that. I freelanced, I went to school up in Boston. I was the editor of my school paper up there, went to journalism school, and somehow I backdoored into this element of publishing, which has turned out to be a very great way to make a living. It’s a great way to meet interesting people and give me the time I need to also work on some books of my own that nobody reads but I still crank them out. Now I would love to hear about the path you took from college to becoming a ghostwriter. What was your first job after college? You know what, I took a job, I was lucky enough to win an award in my senior year of college from Gulf and Western which used to be, if you remember from the old Mel Brooks movies, Engulf and Devour was how he sort of parodied corporate America. So Engulf and Devour awarded me a publishing scholarship in my last year of school. And Gulf and Western was the parent company of Simon & Schuster at the time. So the award came with a job after graduation at Simon & Schuster, which was not something I wanted, although I did want the scholarship that came from my last year of school. So I grabbed their money and I went to New York to work as a publicist at a publishing house, which turned out to be a very clever, scheming thing to do, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. I was fairly miserable working there as a Gulf and Western scholarship winner, I had the ear of and access to all the players at Simon & Schuster at the time, including the chairman of the company, Dick Snyder. So I would go into his office every so often and sort of complain, I didn’t want to be here, I want to be a writer, this is no place for a writer, you publish books, I want to write the books that you publish. At some point, after I finished my one-year obligation to them in honor of the scholarship that I won, I had one foot out the door, and he threw me a bone. They sent me over to 30 Rock, across the street from where Simon & Schuster is located in Manhattan, because they had signed a book with Willard Scott. Do you remember Willard Scott, the happy weatherman from the Today Show? Back in the day. So I went over to meet Willard, and he said, well, Simon & Schuster sent you over here, what the hell do I care? You can write my book. And I wrote Willard Scott’s book. I was 25, 26 years old and that was my first adventure, thinking it would be a one-off and that would be one and done and move on to something else. But it’s like you get something stuck on your shoe, Clay, and it stays with you for the next 30 years. I’m one of these people that I don’t have a whole lot of skill, but I’m very curious. And so I’d like to unpack a few things that you just said. College. Did you go to college? It was at Tufts University. Is that correct? Tufts University? That’s correct. I went to Tufts University outside of Boston. And so when you got your first job as a publicist, we have listeners all over the world, and some people don’t know what that word means. How would you describe what it meant to be a publicist? My job was to promote and get some sort of attention for the books that Simon & Schuster was publishing. That included writing press releases and calling producers of big shows like the Today Show and Good Morning America, and little shows like Hey, How Are You Cincinnati. And because I was relatively junior, I was working with smaller authors on smaller books. It was ultimately a very frustrating job because my ability to perform was only as good as the appeal of the authors I had were to these producers that I was pitching them to. That’s basically what a publicist does. We also would arrange bookstore signings and book events and things of that nature. Now, you mentioned Dick Snyder, and obviously most of the listeners out there, some have heard the name, but most people really don’t know his personality and what it was like to work for someone of that power, prestige, that sort of position. What was it like to work for Dick Snyder? Well, he was a very gruff guy. I didn’t work directly for him. He was in an upstairs office, and I merely had access to poke my head in once in a while and say, excuse me, Mr. Snyder, I’m the kid from Tufts who won this scholarship. But he had quite a roar and quite a presence in the publishing industry. He used to wear these suspenders. Lots of people in publishing wear suspenders. I don’t know if you know that, Clay. Or at least they did in the early 1980s. It’s a very intimidating kind of power look. There was an editor at Simon & Schuster at the time named Michael Korda, who also wrote a book called Power, How to Get It, How to Use It, What to Do with It When You Find It, How to Stay Out of Its Way. So there were some interesting characters at Simon & Schuster at the time, but I was insulated from them to a degree because I was working in the publicity department, which was on a different floor from the power base. But it was a unique setup because I got to go upstairs and pick his brain every once in a while. Together with his wife, he was married at the time to a woman named Joni Evans, who was the publisher of Simon & Schuster at the time as well. You worked at 30 Rock. Do you still call Manhattan your home or New York your home at this point? I do, yeah. I live outside the city, but I do go into the city every so often. That’s kind of my home base. But I work in an office in my house, often in my underwear. Really? TMI? No, this is interesting, because I think this ties into a question I have here. A lot of people ask me, they say, Clay, where do you record your podcast? At some point, Daniel, have you ever been to Oklahoma, by the way? Have you ever been to Oklahoma? I have not been to Oklahoma, although I had a sister who lived and worked there for a little bit, but no, I have not been there. I know it’s on your bucket list and you’re still a young man, but at any point, if you come to Oklahoma for a sod farm tour, a lot of people will come here for our conferences and they’ll say, Clay, where do you record your show? I live on, it’s 17 acres, we call it Camp Clark in Chicken Palace. And if you could imagine a dive bar with sort of a patina of a business that’s been around for a hundred years, a lot of decor, pictures, photos, signed things, that’s kind of my man cave. What does your writing space look like? What does that place and that space look like where you sit down to write the things you write? I’ve carved out a small room off the main floor of my house, and it’s lined with bookshelves, and there’s a fireplace in there that doesn’t work, but it has become a repository for books and stacks of papers. I kind of cocoon myself in here and work at odd hours when the spirit moves me. I made the mistake, and you’re probably old enough to remember this reference, but there was a Dick Van Patten TV show From the 70s and 80s called eight is enough Okay, and he was a kind of stay-at-home journalist and he had a study I don’t have a study but he had a study off of the grand dining hall in his home and that was sort of the Fulcrum of all the activity in the house and one of the eight children if they got in trouble He he called them into their office for a serious talk. That was always the highlight of each episode. And it was this book lined, wood paneled room with a beautiful oak desk. And that was my vision of what it would be like to work at home as a writer. And so I stupidly positioned my office right by the front door off the dining room, just like he had it in Eighties Enough, not really counting for the fact that, you know, when the kids would come home from school and my kids were living in the house, the house would get busy and noisy and I wouldn’t be able to work at all. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. What are your prime writing hours? What are your prime writing hours? I mean, do you, because you have your own space you’ve carved out now, it’s lined with books, I can kind of picture it there. What time is your peak writing time? You know what, it really varies. When I’m working on something of my own, if I’m working on a piece of fiction, I’ve published a few novels, I’ve written some nonfiction books of my own, I tend to do that first thing in the morning. When I’m working on other people’s books, there is no such thing as writer’s block to me because the story exists. I know what the beginning is, what the middle is, what the end is. That becomes more like a work of craftsmanship. So I’m able to do that at any time. And that’s really a function of what my deadline is. It’s kind of like moving through life with a turn paper hanging constantly over your head. So if there’s something due, I’ll work all night to get it done. And if it’s a beautiful day outside and I want to go for a run, or if I want to go away for a week and go skiing because there’s been a lot of snow and I want to take advantage of that. I’ll put a pin in what I’m doing and go off and do that, but then I have to pay the price when I get back and work all night for a couple of weeks. So after you did your first book, your first ghostwriting book, I believe, with Willard Scott, when did you believe that you started to gain traction, where you began to be sought after for ghostwriting projects? You know, I didn’t really trust it for the longest time. My idea early on, as I mentioned, was to do it once and and try to get some traction as a writer of my own. Remember, I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, not one or the other. I wanted to be both. So I didn’t set out to write other people’s books for a lot of writers. It’s sort of a fallback position when you can’t make a living and you can’t make a go of it with your own material, there’s an honest buck to be made helping others realize their dreams in print. So I was really hoping to be able to get traction with my own work, and I was lucky enough to publish a novel early on when I was still a kid, but I couldn’t bring readers to it. It was good enough to get published, but it wasn’t good enough to take off. So as the Willard book came and went, I replaced it with another one, and then there was another one. Each time, I counted myself lucky that I’d find a gig that would help me pay my rent for the next six months or a year. I didn’t really trust it until I was maybe five or six years into it, realizing that there’s a steady stream of work here and there aren’t a lot of people who are doing this work. So that’s why when you say I’m a slightly above average ghostwriter, that’s kind of all you had to be when I started doing it because there weren’t a lot of people doing it. Tell us more about the decor of the place where you are writing. You have the books, it’s lined with books. What kind of desk are you writing from here? It’s an old desk that I grabbed from my father’s textile factory in lower Manhattan, and it’s a big, blonde wood desk, like one of those things where the drawers reach like three foot deep. And who knows what’s living inside these drawers? And the room is kind of a mess. It looks like a cyclone has hit it. So the shelves are filled, but then the books are kind of stand there at some towers of books on the floor, too. I’m afraid to admit And usually whatever book I’m working on I kind of work on two or three books at a time now So I have papers stacked all over and notes and files for those books as well Do you listen to music while you’re writing is it silent? Do you listen to ambient noise? Do you unleash a herd of wild chickens into your studio? What do you do? What’s your process? I do occasionally listen to music at different times in, in, in, in the writing process, um, when I’m editing, as you must know, there’s a lot of back and forth with publishers. Once, once a project is essentially done, there’s, there’s a copy edited manuscript and there’s first pass pages. And there’s a lot of, um, drudgery kind of reading that goes along with the writing. And for that, I’ll listen to music loud. When I’m creating something and trying to fill a blank piece of paper or a blank screen, I tend to listen to stuff without lyrics. The lyrics are distracting, so I’ll listen to jazz or I’ll listen to those weird spa channels that you can find sometimes that you hear at the gym. gym, but ambient noise is the way to go for me. The lyrics mess me up. Do you ever listen to Hans Zimmer or John Williams or some sort of score composer? I do occasionally listen to scores. John Williams, yes. Hans Zimmer, no. I do listen to some classical music from time to time also. There’s a wonderful collection of piano concertos that lived on my computer for the longest time before you had to stream this stuff. Are you typing from a Mac computer? Do you like to type from multiple screens? Walk us through the technology. I’m a PC guy, so I have a big PC computer sitting on my desk. I invest it in on top of this grand old Oak desk that I have. My wife bought me a couple of years ago one of those stand up collapsible kind of desks to help with your posture. So it’s not often standing, but I have that ability and in theory I do that from time to time. And then I also work on a screen occasionally, so I have a little portable tablet, laptop thing that I take with me when I travel and I work on that as well. And sometimes I just move to another part of the house and work there too. Now, you have worked on books with retired Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis. For the listeners out there who don’t know, you’ve worked with award-winning actor who I’m a huge fan of, Denzel Washington, the famous Shark Tank judge and entrepreneur, Damon John, the legendary basketball coach, Bob Hurley, who just his career is ridiculous. Can you talk to us about some of the common denominators that you have found about the personality types of what I would call super successful people? Well, for one thing, and lucky for me, is they’re too busy to sit down and write a book by themselves. Okay, right. So I get work. But I would say they’re moving a million miles a minute. One of the first examples I saw of that in my own career was when I did a book with George Pataki, who was a first-term governor of New York State when I was working with him. I was young and I had little kids, and I probably spent more time waiting for him outside his office than I actually spent with him inside his office. office and you begin to realize that successful people are somehow able to choreograph their days in such a way that they move from one thing to the next, almost like a pinball in a lit pinball machine. I’d say that’s true of Bob Hurley, that’s true of Denzel, that’s true of Serena Williams, all the people that I’ve been blessed to be able to work with. If you live a book-worthy life, it means that you’ve found a way to cram a lot into that life. So, let’s go person by person. I’m not going to ask any paint-you-in-a-corner questions about anything personal. The listeners out there probably would never get a chance to sit down with a person of the character of Denzel Washington. Denzel has given so many eloquent speeches when he’s not acting, you know, when it’s Denzel. And I just I have a big respect for what he’s done. What do you what if you what did you find to be the most admirable character attribute of Denzel Washington from from your perspective, spending time with him? Well, I suppose it would be helpful to your listeners, Clay, if I told them what that book, what the conceit of that book was. Yeah, because it wasn’t a traditional memoir. In Denzel’s case, you might know, your listeners might know, he was, I believe he still is, but at the time he was the national spokesperson for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. He grew up as the product of the Boys Clubs in his neighborhood in the Bronx, and in Mount Vernon, I’m sorry, in upstate New York, or just north of the Volunteers who helped to shape the hearts and minds of young people who do not have every advantage all across this country So what we did in that book is we went out together in some cases often I would do it on my own and we would interview some prominent alums of the New York Yankees at the time, to Muhammad Ali. We collected about 90 people that we interviewed who all had some connection to the Boys and Girls Clubs, and we asked them to speak about role models, mentors, and influences in their life. So, the very nature of this book, I think, reflects on Denzel’s character. He did not want to write a book about himself. He wanted to write a book about people lifting others, and the book was called A Hand to Guide Me, and it really became a very successful book. It was the kind of book that people gave to their kids on graduation, big ceremonial occasions, because it offered a model for how to give and how to receive help from someone else. You’ve sat down with so many iconic people. I want to just go through a couple more because I know our listeners are infinitely curious. I’m going to get all sorts of email feedback if I don’t ask these questions. Ray Lewis is an iconic character. He’s a guy that I subscribed to the NFL package just to watch all of the Ravens games I could possibly watch, and one of our Thrive Time show guests, Justin Forsett, was on the Ravens where the legendary Ray Lewis played. I’ve just heard so many things about Ray Lewis anecdotally from other people. What was he like to sit down with? He has the passion of a preacher and the cadence of a preacher when you speak to him. So the man is all heart. The way he played, the way you saw him play on the field, is kind of the way he goes at life, even in retirement. I worked with him the year he retired, so he was no longer training to play football, but he worked out as hard as anybody I’ve ever seen, and he was no longer playing professionally at that point. That’s kind of the way he attacked the book. He was very thorough. We would actually meet at a friend of his house because he lived in Baltimore So we would meet in the city. He played football with Rowan Marley who was Bob Marley’s son Oh, wow, and he was raised teammate at Miami and they’ve become, you know Lifelong friends and Rowan would would allow us to park at his place To meet because it was a nice mid midpoint And Ray was was always there and he did his homework. If I had told him, Ray, we’re going to talk about your senior year in high school, he had gone back and pulled all the clips and got his head around the material we were going to discuss, and he went at it hard. When you hear him talk about a game and it’s just the two of you in a room, he can break it down in such a way as though you feel you’re there with him. He did this most amazingly when he was talking about his wrestling matches. Do you know that he was a national champion high school wrestler and his plan, his fantasy or the realistic goal really was to wrestle in college. That’s what he was hoping to do. When that didn’t quite work out, as a fallback he wound up going to Miami and just embarking on one of the greatest NFL careers ever. How many hours do you typically spend with the person that you are going to collaborate with when you’re doing the researching phase, the gathering phase, the interviewing process? Again, it varies. I try not to run a tape. Most of these books are born through interviews that I capture on tape and then I transcribe, transcribed, but I try not to run a tape until I spend a couple of weekends just hanging around with this person and osmosing the ways they live, paying attention to how they look out at the world, paying attention to how they speak, how they interact with their friends, with their family. So I try to be a fly on the wall a little bit and see what they see and think what they think before I bother them with a tape recorder. You probably notice this when you interview some guests, although maybe not if you’re doing some of these interviews by phone like this one, but when you present a recording device it changes the nature of the conversation. It becomes an obtrusive measure, and you want to try to eliminate that as much as possible. I once, when I was working with Serena Williams on her book, this was maybe 10 years ago, and I used to, for the longest time, use one of those old Dadalax Radio Shack cassette recorders. Oh, wow. Because I didn’t trust the digital technology yet 10 years ago, and those micro cassette recorders that a lot of reporters used, I found very unreliable. The tapes would get all tangled and mangled, and the only thing I trusted were those classic old cassette recorders. So I would pull out this Radio Shack recorder that was about the size of a shoebox and I had all this with me whenever I bounced around the country to go meet someone. I was sitting with Serena one afternoon in a coffee shop and I put it down on the coffee table between us and she said, ìIf I buy you a small mini recorder, would you maybe use that instead?” I think because she was just embarrassed to be seen with this guy with a big old, you know, she’s from a younger generation. Who carries one of those things around? How come you didn’t just roll up with a boom box with a dual cassette player and the big old subwoofers mounted in there? Just carry that around like your ear while you’re interviewing people. Exactly, but it does change the conversation. And so I try to really develop a connection with the person I’m working with before I introduce the elements of the work at hand. Because I find you get a fresher, more genuine take if they don’t really realize that you’re recording them or that you’re working. How many edits, after you’ve written the manuscript, right? So you’ve written it. I don’t think the listeners out there appreciate this. I’ve heard Paul Graham, the famous entrepreneur who built VIAweb and helped with Airbnb and Dropbox, he talks about the first eight iterations of anything are a word I won’t say on the podcast. I’ve heard Ernest Hemingway say the first version of anything is a word I won’t say on the podcast. How many times do you completely edit that manuscript? Once you said, okay, it is written. How many times do you edit it before it’s ready to be printed? You’d be surprised, Clay. Sometimes it’s zero. Of course, I edit it myself before I send it on to the subject I’m working with for review. Sometimes they don’t change a word. And then sometimes they roll up their sleeves and really have at it and kick it back to me and we go back and forth. It usually doesn’t happen in one finished chunk. I’ll probably send 30 or 40 pages at a time just to make sure that they’re happy with the tone of voice, with the way I have them speaking, with the language choices that I make, with the structure that I have in mind. Sometimes they’ll have a grid that they want me to follow. It really So it really varies. I’ve done maybe 50 some odd collaborations, and everyone really takes a different path. How many times do you edit it before you send it on? Well, it’s different. When I started out, I believe the first couple of books I did were not on the computer. So when you’re writing a book on a typewriter, it’s a whole different beast. So, you know, when I’m working in a word processing scenario, you know, before I start work each day, I’ll often go back and polish what I’ve written the day before. So I don’t think of that as really revising the whole manuscript at that point. It helps me to get back in the frame of mind that I was in the day before where I left off. So I do make changes all the time as I’m creating a manuscript. Of course, now you have the ability, if I’m in chapter 8 or on page 100, I can go back and revisit something I wrote in chapter 2 or 3 that’s affected by what I just wrote in chapter 10. So it’s a much more fluid process now than it was when I first started doing it. Now, Daniel, I don’t expect you to listen to a bunch of our podcasts as preparation for an interview, but just my background. I’m 38. My partner’s 54. Dr. Zellner has three kids. I have five. Between the two of us, we’ve built 13, going on now 14 and 15, multimillion dollar companies. People say- I did check you out. Okay, yeah. People always say, Clay, how would you describe yourself? I get asked that a lot at conferences. How would you describe your mindset? And I kind of consider myself as an artist slash entrepreneur. I think I just paint with capitalism. So that makes me impossible to… It makes it hard for me to stop a project once I’ve started, because it’s not about the money. It’s about making it perfect. Can you talk to me about that? Because I think you are an artist slash entrepreneur, too So you probably have the same problem. Do you ever have a hard time turning it off or do you ever turn it off? You know, it’s it’s very hard because there are a lot of moving parts that go into the making of a book So when I’m in the middle of working on something I do find that it’s bouncing around in my head all the time To the point where I could be tossing and turning at three o’clock in the morning And I just can’t sleep and I get up and try to set things down on paper. So I kind of know where everything is and begun to take shape in my mind before it’s even down on paper. So I can’t imagine I’m all that much fun to be around during those moments. Days tend to fly by. Those are really the best times as a writer when you realize there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do what you have to do. You wake up one morning and then all of a sudden you realize it’s midnight. Those are kind of fun when you get locked into a zone like that. And that’s what happens when you’re trying to reassemble the stuff of someone else’s life, a life you’ve only recently become acquainted with, and try to set it all down on paper. But then there could be weeks where everything is kind of slow and meandering, and I wouldn’t describe my days like that at all. So it all varies. I don’t know if that answered your question. No, this is great. I just think the listeners out there, this is one thing, a lot of our listeners out there are just dipping their toe into the world of entrepreneurship. And then other people have these huge businesses, and they say, well, Clay, you know how many hours a week do you work? And I’m like, well, you know, I woke up at three the other night and I wrote something down on my little yellow tablet. Then I went, took a shower, thought about it then, too, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever. So a hundred? I mean, you know what I mean? It’s like, I’d like to ask you maybe the same kind of question. How long does it, how many hours do you typically have to invest in a book? You know, with the person, with the subject directly, we’re probably together face to face for 30 to 40 hours of interview time, not just hanging out time or having dinner. So there’s really 30 to 40 hours of face to face interview time. But the books itself can stretch on for six months to a year. That doesn’t mean that that becomes my nine to five for the year. The person I’m working with might be busy doing other things and can’t devote his or her attention for weeks at a time, which is why I like to have a couple of things going. But I get what you’re talking about with the entrepreneur’s mindset. The past few books I’ve done with Daymond John, for example, have introduced me to dozens of folks that he’s met through his Shark Tank partnerships who really walk that same walk. In fact, our last book was called Rise and Grind, and it was all about the hard-charging mentality you need to embrace in your career and in your relationships if you want to succeed. How did that relationship with Damon John come about? That was pre-Shark Tank. We’ve done four books together. Damon and I were hoping to start on a fifth. It started as an introduction through my agent, my literary agent. He was out to do a book, sort of the origin stories of FUBU, his fashion line where he made his bones. It was a story of how he went from being a kid from the streets of Hollis, Queens, being by a single mom who had an idea for a clothing line that would sort of make his friends feel included, like they could belong to a movement. Out of that, he grew FUBU, which became sort of a pioneering urban fashion brand. That’s what put him on the map. FUBU had been around maybe five or six years when he and I did the first book. The first couple of books we did didn’t get a whole lot of love. The last couple of books post Shark Tank have been phenomenal successes. I can show you that it helps to have a platform. I’m not going to ask you with a platform or without a platform how much you make per book or specific dollar figures. If somebody goes and buys a book today at Barnes & Noble for $20, or I buy one on Amazon for $20, how is the money divided and how does it get to you and the subject and then the agent and then the publisher? Are you making like two cents a book? The lowly ghostwriter might sometimes be making two cents a book, but the author himself, I mean, let’s just talk in general what the author makes. Most author contracts return a royalty to the author of about 15%. It starts at 10%, then it’s 12.5%, but these are in small numbers. By the time you sell your 10,000th copy of the book, you make 15% for the rest of the run of the book. And that’s off of the cover price, so it doesn’t matter what Barnes & Noble or Amazon has discounted it to. If it’s a $30 book, you’re making $4.50 a book, which is not a whole lot of money when you consider what the publisher is making. Typically, when you’re dealing with a bookseller like a Barnes and Noble, they take half of that list price and the other half goes to the publisher. But out of that, the publisher has to pay their hard costs, their production costs, their salaries, and all that, their development costs. So there’s not a lot of money to go around. What was your first book that really took off and you remember thinking to yourself, you know what? I’m actually a best-selling author! Woo! When did that happen? The first book that I wrote, I’m trying to think which of the first bestseller was. One of the first was a book I wrote with Geraldo Rivera called Exposing Myself, which was one of my favorite titles of all of my books. It was actually a line that came from Ruben Frank, who was the president of NBC News at the time, or maybe ABC News. Geraldo was at ABC, but he said to a reporter one day that Geraldo Rivera should be arrested for exposing himself. Out of that line, Geraldo decided that this is what we were going to call his book. That book became a big success. It made a lot of headlines. That was one of the first books that I saw land in the New York Times bestseller list with my name on it, and that was pretty cool. Do you, I just, it’s so interesting because you are super well known in literary circles as sort of the really above average ghost writer guy. But the average person on the streets, the average listener, probably does not know your name. What’s it like to write books? What’s it like to go to a bookstore and see your books you’ve written going, okay, that’s my book, and that’s my book over there, too. Oh, and that’s, I mean, you’ve had multiple times where you’ve had best-selling books, you know, in the stores at the same time. What’s it like to do that and to be completely anonymous to the average reader? You know what, Clay, it’s not, I mean, it was a goose the first couple times it happened, but it wasn’t really frustrating because what I’ve realized, to do this kind of work over the long haul and to be successful at it and not just to be successful at it, but to be content with it, you really can’t have an ego. I don’t think of it like very often I won’t get credit on the cover of a book. In fact, from time to time, I’ll get offered money to take my name off the book, which is the sweetest deal going in publishing. You just really can’t or I have not let myself get caught up in the fact that I’m not getting credit in a public way. The people in publishing know what my involvement is. It helps me get work. It’s helped me build a sustained career, but it doesn’t allow me to drag my friends or my kids into a bookstore and say, �Hey, look at me. I’m in the window.� It’s never been about that. Now, if it was a book of my own in the window, I’d be doing cartwheels if I knew how to do a cartwheel. But for these other books, there’s sort of a pride in craftsmanship. I used that word before, early in our conversation. It does feel more to me like a craft than an art. And I suppose I feel the same way that a cabinetmaker might feel when he goes to visit somebody in their home and he’s built them a beautiful set of bookshelves that they get to enjoy on a daily basis and he hasn’t seen until he visits them five years later and sees how they live with this little piece of artwork and craftsmanship that he’s provided with them. So I kind of feel more like that and I don’t feel the need to go and crow and say, hey, look at me, look at the book that I’ve done. However, that said, I will tell you that it is my fantasy, as yet unrealized, so maybe some of your listeners will help me out on this. It’s my fantasy to sit down on a plane next to somebody reading my book. That to me would be the coolest thing in the world. So which book should we read? You know, we’re halfway through the trip and I’d say, hey, how do you like that book? How’s it going? Should we read, should we all go pick up a copy of Scratching the Horizon, A Surfing Life? That would make me happy. Your name is on the cover of that one. Your name is on the cover of that one. Which book do you want us to get right now? Andrew is going to buy it right now on Amazon. I bet I have enough influence that maybe two or three other people will also buy these books. What is the book right now that we all need to buy? I’ll tell you the names of a couple of books that don’t get a lot of love, and they’re my very favorite books. I’m buying them already. This is nothing against the name-above-the-title people that I work with who have become friends of mine and I’ve come to admire in new ways after working with them, but I really do love working with ordinary people who’ve done or seen or experienced something extraordinary. To me, that is much more gratifying than working with somebody who’s had a microphone or a camera in their face for their entire lives. They’ve told the same stories over and over again. But if I work with somebody for whom this is brand new, the material I’m able to pull from their lives and set between hard covers is so much richer, and to me it’s a much more rewarding experience. So one of the books you just mentioned is a book called Scratching the Horizon, and I wrote that with a gentleman named Izzy Paskowitz who is a legendary surfer. He’s from a famous California surf family. He grew up off the grid. His father was this nutty doctor, a Stanford-trained doctor, who decided to raise his nine children in a camper. No school, no nothing, and they just bounced around the California coast at first, and then all over the country, and even to Israel. And all these kids did all day was surf. Izzy, I’m buying the book right now. We’re buying the book right on Amazon, right? We bought it. We just bought it. We’re going to make sure we leave an objective review after we devour the book. That will happen. What’s the next book? The next book, which your listeners should really spark to, is a book that I wrote with a Holocaust survivor. Her name is Christina Hegar. And she survived for 14 months during the war in a sewer in Lwów, Poland, initially with a group of 20 Jews. Only 10 survived the war. She survived with her whole nuclear family. She was seven years old when she came out of the sewer for the first time after 14 months. And that book is called The Girl in the Green Sweater. She wore the same green sweater that her grandmother knitted for her before the occupation. Is that a movie? In Lvov. It was made into a movie by Agnieszka Holland that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film a few years ago. The movie was called In Darkness. Okay, I thought I’d heard that. I had not seen that movie, but it sounded familiar. It’s quite a story. She’s a remarkable woman. She never really spoke about her story until she sat down with me. When I asked her about that, she emigrated to Israel after the war, where she and her family settled. She never talked about it from that point forward until she was an older woman. I said, why didn’t you share this story with other people? She says, everybody has a story. We are all here because we have our stories. She didn’t want to burden anybody with her story. So to me that was a great honor to be able to help her set her book down between hard covers and put it out into the world. So that’s another one your listeners should get. We are picking up that book. We’re picking up both books. We just bought it. Okay, second confirmed Amazon purchase. We’ve got Amazon Prime. Big ball in here. Buying the books. Getting it done. If you’re out there listening, decide right now which book do you want to get? Scratch the Horizon, The Girl in the Green Sweater, we wouldn’t question your Americanism if you don’t buy this book from Daniel Pastner. But we would say, you know, maybe you should buy it. Maybe you should forgo the regrettable purchases at your local convenience store this week. Maybe a hot dog you shouldn’t have, or some coffee, or a Starbucks beverage. Go ahead and just purchase one of those two books right now. I have three final questions for you. I want to respect your time here, but I’m really just fascinated with this. You’re a guy who’s very proactive. You’re just a craftsman. I kind of consider you an artist meets entrepreneur. We could agree on craftsman. How do you organize your day? On a typical day, what time do you wake up and how do you organize the first four hours of your day? You know, it’s a fluid thing, Clay, it really has to do with what’s driving me and what’s on my plate at that moment. So, I am also a famous and fabulous procrastinator. I love to play hooky. I happen to write quickly and efficiently, and if you promise not to share this secret with any of the people I’m working with or any of the publishers I’m working with, I often overestimate how long things are going to take me, and I’m able to do that because the convention is that it takes a long time. I don’t need as much time as they give me on these deadlines. So as long as I can meet the deadlines, I can find out. There’s a lot of elastic in my days. So at different points in my life, I’ve had different pursuits. When I started out writing, I also started running. I became a marathoner when I was in my late 20s. So as you can imagine, you need to put in a lot of road work to prepare for a marathon. You need to run 50, 60 miles a week for the 20, 30 weeks leading up to the marathon. So that filled a lot. So I’ll find any excuse to put down my pen and go outside and do something as long as I know that I can meet the deadline. I’ve never missed a deadline. So my days are all looking kind of different. But again, like I mentioned, the stuff of my own that I work on, I kind of need to be fresh first thing in the morning, no distractions before I read the paper, before I see my kids, before I see my wife. And the other stuff is more workmanlike. And I’m able to do that at any time I grab, I grab whatever time I can. And what time are you like, do you typically like to wake up? You know what, I would love, if I could wake up at 7.30 every morning and feeling refreshed from a good night’s sleep, that would be ideal. The problem is when I’m tossing and turning, when I’m assembling the stuff of someone’s life, like I told you, it often feels like to me, and I can’t sleep, and I’m thrown out of bed at 3 or 4 in the morning to work, then I have no choice in the matter. But I will tell you, when those days happen, and it’s 7.30 in the morning, and I’ve already put in 3 or 4 hours of work, that kind of feels great when it’s 7.30 in the morning and you know that you’ve made that kind of headway. Now, my final two questions are for you. You’ve had so much success, yet you’re a guy who would take time out of your schedule to share your wisdom or your advice for the things you’ve learned with an audience of half a million people. What still motivates you today? What’s your big thing you’re working on here in the next 12 months, or what’s your big passion projects? Well, you know, I have books of my own that I’d love to write, and I’d love for them to find a wide readership. I just published a novel two years ago with an independent press outside of D.C., which was my passion project for the longest time, until I found a way to put that out into the world. Now, I’m working on another one. The deal I made with myself early on in the Willard Scott days of my career was I would write one of theirs and one of mine, and that would be the balance, but it didn’t really work out that way. I’ve written 60 of theirs and 5 of mine, so sometimes you need to pay the orthodontist bill or sometimes I’ve got a daughter who’s getting married and you’ve got to deal with that or college tuition bill, and life gets in the way of what your plans are. So my goal now, my dream now is to maybe get to a place in my career where the books of my own can speak for themselves and can throw off the kind of living I need to keep ahead of my expenses. So those are my passion projects. Now I’m working on a novel now. now, probably, if I had to describe it, it’s probably about a guy around my age going through the similar emotions as I am, sort of worrying about or wondering about the kind of footprint he’s left behind. What does it mean to matter? What does it mean to leave a legacy and to make a mark? Final question I have for you. There’s listeners out there, many of which are aspiring authors. I would say, if you have a half million people listening, you might have, what, 50, 100, maybe 1,000 people who want to be an author. They want to write that book. What advice would you have for anybody out there that wants to be an author as a profession and they’ve just run into some rejection and maybe they haven’t read about the lives of a lot of authors who’ve also been rejected? What advice would you give to the aspiring authors out there? I believe there is a many-pronged approach here, Clay. The first thing is to read like crazy. You need to have a voracious appetite as a reader if you are going to be a writer. You need to kind of have a template and understand what is possible, what people have an appetite for, what writers have been able to do successfully, what kind of experiments as writers have failed miserably. You just need to immerse yourself into as much of the written word as you can. The other thing you need to do is write and ignore any rejection that comes your way. You are writing for an audience of one and that one is you. If you write something that pleases you and satisfies you, then that’s a successful day of writing. If you can bring someone else on board and have them get something from what you’ve written, then that’s a bonus. That’s really gravy, but I think you need to start with satisfying that audience of one and not worrying about how you’re going to extract a living. Don’t worry about the commercial side of things. In my case, a lot of writers, especially when I started doing this, there was something pejorative about being a ghost writer. It was sort of a backdoor into a writing life. I think that’s changed over the years. I was never writing my own stuff. I was never working in service of my own ideas. What I told myself was, you know, it’s really no different than a struggling actor waiting tables to make a living until he gets his big break. It just so happened that my version of waiting tables allowed me also to stitch words together, something that I was good at, something that came easily to me. So it was writing of a kind, and it was a way for me to make my bones while I was waiting to make a splash as a writer in my own right. I would tell your listeners just to write and read as much as they can. Write and read as much as you can. Daniel, you have just been a blessing to have on the show. I got nervous today. I’m like, oh no, I hope I don’t screw this up. This guy is so good. Thank you so much for being here. No, this was a great interview, Clay. I really enjoyed it. I’m glad you found me. I really enjoyed spending some time with you. Well we’re going to try to sandwich the release of this somewhere between Wolfgang Puck and the founder of Ritz-Carlton. So we’re trying to put you right there, but we’re going to put you on the bookshelf between two greatest of all times. And in my mind you are the greatest of all time in the space of ghost writing. So thank you so much. Well I appreciate it. Can I sneak in two quick plugs for books of my books were out of print, and the Authors Guild has this wonderful back-in-print program that they initiated a few years ago. One is a novel called Morning Wood that’s going to be available this month, and one is a non-fiction book about the baseball that Mark McGuire hit for his 70th home run. It’s called The Ball, Mark McGuire’s 70th home run in the marketing of the American Dream. And it’s all about the aftermath of that 1998 baseball season, for those of your listeners who are baseball fans, who might remember that that ball was sold at an auction for $3.05 million. So those books will both be out in new editions later this month. Well congratulations. I know that’s great to have those big projects completed in a way that you’re proud of. Well thanks for taking the time and shining a light on what I do and I enjoyed visiting with you Clay. Alright, well you take care. If you are out there today and you feel like you have this big goal, this big dream, and you’re striving to achieve it, but you don’t know where to start. The reason why I like to interview these huge success stories and then ask them where they started is because I want to make it real for you. I know that you have the capacity and the tenacity to achieve your dreams. So as an action item today, I’d encourage everybody to get out a sheet of paper, a journal, a notebook, something you’re going to see every day. Maybe get out a mirror and write on there where you want to be three years from today. Three years from today. And then on that same sheet of paper, that same journal, that same mirror, wherever you’re going to see it every day, write down what are the daily action steps that you need to take every single day to get you a half a percent closer to that goal. Or maybe a tenth of a percent closer to that goal. Because it’s the compound interest of taking those daily action steps that’s going to create the foundation for the success that you want to achieve. It’s not one big event. You’re not gonna go viral on YouTube and all of a sudden have a book deal. You’ve gotta sit down and block out time into your calendar if you wanna be an author for daily writing, just like Daniel talked about. You gotta block out time every day to practice your craft. And that’s how you become good, and then how you become better, and then how you become significantly above average, and then that’s how you’ll become, eventually, the greatest ghostwriter of all time. My name’s Clay Clark. We like to end each and every show with a boom. And so, now without any further ado, here we go. Three, two, one, boom! JT, do you know what time it is? 4.10. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Oklahoma baby! Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma June 27th and 28th. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old, but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award winning Tim Tebow come present and a lot of people you know have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field and off the field the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now the big question is JT how does he do it? Mmm well they’re gonna have to come and find out because I don’t know. Well I’m just saying Tim Tebow is gonna teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Who will be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some real estate sort of things. Yeah. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business, and he’s built over $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind Nine Round Boxing. He’s going to be here in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He has inspired me listening to him talk. And not only that, he also has, he practices what he teaches. So he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers. So you’ve got to come learn from him. Also, let me tell you this, folks. I don’t want to get this wrong, because if I get it wrong, someone’s going to say, you screwed that up, buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. You say, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan. 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestselling authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say, Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes, Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s going to be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup. But I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the request tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in a bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that, I had to work for it. And I am super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton, I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27th and 28th. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where’s it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. It’s Tulsa, Russia. It’s I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa Ruslim, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office and so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th and 28th. Who? You! You’re going to come. Who? You! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com and again you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford and we do have some select VIP tickets which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things and those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re gonna give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re gonna leave with a workbook, you’re gonna leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars, and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. And I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California, in the beautiful sunny weather of LA, come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life-changing and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine. I’ll see you in Tulsa. James did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be at the… have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military and he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big-time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins, and he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names, putting out shows day after day, and now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast, and he’s traveled all the way from Puerto Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, if you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the two-day interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big-time, super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life-changing. Get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? ThriveTimeshow.com. James, one more time before it’s too late. One more time for the 40’s! DriveTimeShow.com Everything rides on tonight Even if I got three strikes I’ma go for it This moment, we own it Not to be played with Because it could get dangerous See these people I ride with this moment Thrive Time show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops Because we teach you what you need to know to grow You can learn the proven 13-point business system that dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, with no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. We wouldn’t give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop all you gotta do is go to thrifttimeshow.com to request those tickets and if you can’t afford two hundred fifty dollars we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you I learned at the academy at Kings Point in New York octa non verba watch what a person does not what they say good morning good morning good morning harvard kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts as a mr. Clay Clark is a friend of a good friend Eric Eric Trump But we’re also talking about money bricks and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hour so clay Clark is a very Intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing But I thought since you and Eric are close Trump What were you saying about what Trump can’t what Donald who’s my age and I can say or cannot say First of all, I have to honor you sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here There’s a name of Jeremy Thorne who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway I had a job at Applebee’s Target and DirecTV and he said have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. So anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life. I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Whoa. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business, and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored. You’re awake and alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. It’ll try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get control Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively, they’re pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back, and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are, you know, you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, you know, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay, and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence. That businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort and you’ve got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do and he gave me the road map out step by step. We’ve set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it will be answered. This conference motivates me and also gives me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do it. Everybody can do these things. There’s stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. I can see the marketing working. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun and super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics. So you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. This is where we used to live two years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team and by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from 4 to 14 and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grew us 13 grams for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere of Clay’s office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door. And it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business. Bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a business using Google reviews and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient, and more efficient. How to be a better leader. How to be a better leader. How to be a better leader. and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me, as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business, as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before, we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews has completely eliminated that, would really be the best fit. Hands-on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. The one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. you